Reka: Formalizing a long-term project!

(Originally posted 23 December 2020)

Reka is the unofficially-official name of my Brother KH-801 knitting machine.

This blog is the long-term formalization of a project I’ve been working on for months, and thinking about for a bit longer- so let’s backtrack a little bit.

I’ve been knitting for a few years now, and I like to think I’ve gotten pretty good at it despite not building up a great volume of work. A couple of scarves, a bunch of misshapen baby hats, your standard cables and colorwork. Nothing special, but I like the act of knitting stuff with my hands. I don’t know where I first heard about knitting machines, but once that seed was planted, it was too late. Sitting in my sophomore industrial engineering classes, during lectures on optimization and inventory theory, I couldn’t help but be preoccupied with what is now the basis of what you see before you. I drew out diagrams, thought long and hard about gauge, tension, elasticity, and tens of pages of sketching and daydreaming later, I got it together, scoured Ebay, and found a knitting machine in good condition, for not too much money. I bid a little aggressively, won, and put in for some 4-ply acrylic yarn to test it out on. Several weeks later, Reka was on my doorstep. It had begun.

The Problem is this: Fast fashion, as it is done now, is an incredibly inefficient production paradigm. Companies produce hundreds of thousands of copies of a garment in four or five sizes, only to have overestimated their sales and have to burn billions of dollars in unsold merchandise at the end of the season, causing serious environmental damage, while somehow always being out of your size. Rinse, and repeat. Not to mention, those four or five sizes never really fit anyone the way they really should. A medium is too small, a large is too large, and if you’re lanky, there’s no way to find a dress shirt with long enough sleeves that doesn’t make you look like a hot air balloon after a long day over Albuquerque. And because it’s so much faster and cheaper on the buyer end than getting clothes made by a tailor or doing it themselves, like we did before the industrial revolution, it’s what people are buying.

So here’s what I’m thinking:

• Knitting a slightly bigger or slightly smaller version of the same garment is roughly the same amount of work.

• A garment I haven’t knit yet is just yarn.

• Yarn can become a garment in any size or shape.

So if I have a knitting machine, with which it is more than possible to produce a garment of generally arbitrary size and shape, and I have measurements re: the size and shape of a person’s body, I can make a pattern for that machine and produce a garment that fits that person very well. If I write a computer program that will take in those measurements and make the pattern for me, all I have to do is make the garment, a process greatly expediated by my machine. Reka gets her own blog post down the line with a bit more information on how she works, what’s up with her name, etc.,  so keep an eye out.

This project has 3 main, overarching functions:

• For me to do it, which is fun and cool and rewarding in and of itself

• Sell garments for money, which I will use to do things like pay rent, eat food, and buy more yarn

• Transparently describe the development of this process as a proof of concept: If some dumb kid with limited resources can set up a system in his dorm room that is capable of producing well-fitting garments in an environmentally responsible, economical, and profitable way, than for sure a company like H&M or Forever 21 can look into it, at least as a means to decrease profit loss.

It’s well worth noting that I’m not the only person working with knitting machines. I’m not the only one trying to sell machine-knit garments, and there is a great wealth of information on the internet about this style of production. In fact, there are people that are way deeper into automating machines like these to do things even more complicated than just knitting sweaters that fit nice. I’m just trying to implement it in a way that I think is neat.